LONDON.- Camden Arts Centre presents a new installation by Andro Wekua for what will be his first solo exhibition in the UK. Wekua’s richly coloured works have an innate melancholy. They read on multiple levels like poems, meanings are revealed slowly to leave a haunting atmosphere.

Wekua uses a variety of media and materials including sculpture, drawing, collage and film. Here a life-size sculpture fashioned from a motorcycle is staged amongst paintings and graphic works to theatrical effect. A new film is also shown alongside.

The installation incorporates a rubber sculpture and a reclining wax figure. Materials such as rubber are used for their casting properties which pick up the delicate differences of surfaces. Wax accentuates the lifeless faces of mannequins like dejected puppets waiting to be animated.

“It is as though, in Wekua’s world, we are paradoxically joined in our solitude; we are alone together, privacy existing only in relation to the public from which it seeks protection.” Claire Gilman, Frieze 2008

Wekua employs the skill of the craft maker and the tradition of collage. He culls images from fashion magazines to create a unique visual poetry. Abstract passages of paint and colour trace features and accentuate forms. Compositions and contexts overwrite them with interlocking geometric shapes.

Wekua draws from an often painful past, growing up in Georgia near the Black Sea, a country still plagued by violence. There is an intimacy in his work which communicates a sense of wanting to share the inner workings of the mind and which has a resonant effect on us as viewers.